


burn it down

by orphan_account



Series: Post-Island [2]
Category: Lost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-18 00:29:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5891062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(yes, i pulled a fic title from a death cab song.)<br/>i'm too tired for capital letters now, but they're in the fic. </p><p>this one is just sawyer and cassidy packing up kate's house in l.a. so she doesn't have to do it.<br/>because her two professional criminal best friends/date friends hate it when she's sad about the child she kidnapped, or whatever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	burn it down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [constanted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/constanted/gifts).



> \- if you didn't know already, sawyer and kate are both outrageously bisexual. i see no reason to ignore that.  
> \- cass is a lesbian because i said cass is a lesbian. and because i like it when sawyer's ego takes hits for stupid reasons.  
> \- for the purposes of this 'verse uh, being as simple as possible, we're gonna say kate didn't get caught leaving the state. she's going to move as far away as she can go without hitting the arizona border, though (according to google, this is around a place called blythe where they have an annual bluegrass festival: she and sawyer will fit in beautifully).  
> \- kate is babysitting the group child. i promise i didn't leave clementine in a refrigerator box on someone's doorstep, though that does, undeniably, sound like something i would do.

When he’d mentioned it second time-- how much Cassidy and Kate had to talk about-- Sawyer had been thinking of himself. The last thing he had expected to hear was “We should, she’s from Ames.”  
  
Son of a bitch.

They were knee-deep in kids’ stuff, having spent the better part of an hour trying to box away Aaron’s room. When he looked up to toss her the bag of clothes he’d filled, she was smiling.  
“Lot you don’t know, huh?” Cassidy said, carefully printing CLAIRE on the plastic.

 

He guessed they’d given up on small talk when their plane broke in half.  
It hadn’t seemed very important at the time, and Kate had never been one to look back.  
Until Sawyer sent her to Albuquerque, apparently.

“You knew her?”

Cassidy’s revenge was a subtle thing: very real, he was finding, but if he didn’t watch closely, he might think she was just being herself. There was a reason he had taken a shine to her, after all; a hundred why in another world, he might have loved her. That casual cruelty was at least five of them.  
It was unsettling to imagine, the two of them with their own history. Even more unsettling, he had to wonder: how many times had Kate almost walked into his life, before she finally did?

It was like she could read his mind.

“She was gone by the time _you_ got there,” Cassidy said eventually. Must have decided he’d suffered enough. “But,” she added, “she did get you caught.” Another smile, no doubt as wistful as it was amused by his expression. “Small world, huh?”  
“Something like that,” Sawyer mumbled, whatever reaction he may have had three years ago a mystery. There wasn’t much that surprised him anymore. Besides, it was Kate. If anybody was ever going to be inexplicably tangled in his life like that, for better and for worse, it would be her.

 

* * *

 

Sawyer had turned his attention to the bookshelves, which were-- to Kate’s credit-- almost full. Most of the titles he knew from the island, where he hadn’t had much choice in the matter, but others were familiar from his own childhood. His mother had read to him, too, a thousand years ago. He picked them up one at a time; flipped through their pages, found himself trying to picture what those three years had been like here.

It wasn’t difficult enough.

The book in his hands-- _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ \-- was beaten up: more like the copy Sawyer had first read than any you’d expect in a child’s room. He opened the cover, a white-knuckled grip on the book’s cracked spine, to read what he already knew was there. _Jack, Christmas 1977_ and something else in pencil, long since legible.

 _And that’s why the Sox will never win the damn series_.

“Shouldn’t pack this one,” Sawyer told Cassidy, as firmly as he could. “We’ll get another. This is Jack’s.” _Was_. There was a lot of past tense catching on, those days. Too much. He should take the book to Jack’s mother, he knew, when things settled. Once Kate figured out what the hell could be done. It wasn’t every day they told a mother her son had gotten himself killed. Certainly not that when it happened, he was off playing hero to a magical island no one knew existed.

Cassidy nodded: knowing, if not sympathetic.  
“Just put it back,” she told him. “I’ll keep it.”  
She didn’t say, ‘away from Kate’, but it was implied all the same.  
Sawyer did as he was told for once.  
“Thanks,” he said, his back to her.  
_Thanks, Doc. For everything._

He went back to the shelves, minding the stacks with unnecessary care and wondering, just for a second, how Clementine felt about _Alice_ . Then he felt Cassidy watching him from across the room, and he was about to tell her to piss off when she spoke:  
“You’ll be glad to hear they were miserable.” And damn it, he would have been, once. Would have given just about anything to throw that in Jack’s face.  
Then he’d gone and made the mistake of loving them both.  
Sawyer didn’t turn around.  
“If you hurt her again, I’ll kill you myself.”

That was harder to ignore, both because he deserved it and because if anybody had motive enough to _actually_ kill him, it would be Cassidy.

(He faced her long enough to hand over several books.)

 

“We ain’t... it’s not like that,” he said finally. “Not any--”  
“I don’t really care what it’s like,” came the reply. Sawyer could have kissed her for cutting him off, but figured there was probably a rule or twelve about lesbian exes who hate you.  
Especially when said exes weren’t finished interrupting.  
“Just go if you’re gonna. We’re fine,” Cassidy added, like he had any doubt. “She wouldn’t be.”  
A beat, then, softly:  
“Not again.”

So there it was.  
All those times he’d convinced himself things had happened how they’d needed to, and all he’d really managed to do was ruin Kate’s life and end Juliet’s.  
Hell, probably Jack’s, too.

All because he’d been too scared to face the mess he’d made, and look where he’d ended up.  
His life was a damned Alanis Morissette song.

“I’m here,” Sawyer answered eventually, having weighed his options at length and deciding it was no good, being defensive. For him, it had never been a question. All he had left, might have, was between there and Albuquerque. All Kate had left was in that room.  “Wouldn’t expect much, but--”

And she was laughing.  
“You’re full of shit,” she told him: plainly, like he’d asked if it was raining.

**Author's Note:**

> if you didn't already, i want us all to pause and laugh right now about sawyer's internal monologue casually referencing alanis morissette, which is arguably the most in-character thing i've ever decided. carry on.


End file.
